


learn a thing (or two)

by RiiasShorts



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Awkward Sexual Situations, Brief mention of a pregnancy scare, Childhood Friends, F/M, G-Spot, Heartbreak, Heavy Angst, Mentions of Drunkenness, Mentions of childbirth in an educational setting, Mentions of dubcon in an educational setting (doesn't actually happen to a character), Non-Explicit Sex, Non-Linear Narrative, Parent Ben Solo, Past Relationship(s), Sex Education, Sex-positive attitudes all around, Single Parents, Teacher Rey (Star Wars), Unbeta'd, Wet Dream, but its all consensual, but its still an hea
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-16
Updated: 2020-10-16
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:41:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27036619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RiiasShorts/pseuds/RiiasShorts
Summary: Sometimes she thinks it’s unhealthy that she tells her class so many stories about him. It immortalizes him in her head and forces her not to forget. It’s masochistic, the way she buries her thoughts in layers of Ben because she’s so afraid she’ll let go of the one good thing she’d had.But he let go so long ago.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 32
Kudos: 175





	learn a thing (or two)

**Author's Note:**

> hey lovelies! this is is a prompt fill from @someonesbh on twitter: Sex Ed teacher Rey tells stories of her ex-boyfriend to her high school class. When single dad Ben hears the tales from his teenage daughter, they sound oddly familiar. He pays a visit to the Sex Ed teacher only to come face to face with the one that got away.
> 
> a couple changes though: his daughter is in 8th grade, which is middle school. she's 13, for anyone who doesn't know the age of 8th graders (totally understandable lol)
> 
> might do a part two to this? depends on what you all think

“Do you really want another story?” Rey asks in disbelief. 

“Yes!” one girl, Hanna, shouts, and the rest of the class is nodding with her. 

Different voices pipe up from all over the room:

“I love your stories!”

“I want to hear about him again!”

“ _ Please _ , Ms. Jackson!”

She grins and maybe blushes a little.

Fine. She blushes a  _ lot _ .

“Okay,” she concedes, looking up at the screen. The Powerpoint slide displayed there has, in giant pink letters, the word “foreplay” written at the top.

Is it part of the curriculum? No. Should it be? Absolutely. 

Her attention returns to the kids staring at her, their undivided attention on her. Rey’s eyes flit across all of their faces, smiling fondly at the girls. She loves classes like this, the ones that engage with her lectures and enjoy her stories. It’s always the girls who really interact with her and the material, which is part of why she loves the Sex Ed unit. Her fellow health teacher, Mr. Dameron, takes the boys from both his and her classes, and she takes the girls. It’s fun, at least when she teaches it right. On the first day, she always makes the entire class shout the word “penis” and laugh about it, just to get the giggles out. The little exercise doubles as a mood-setter, helping Mr. Dameron’s girls get a feel for her and her teaching style. She’s never been one to take herself too seriously, after all.

“Alright, um…” She closes her eyes, running over the stories she remembers from high school and college, when she had the time to fuck instead of grading assignments about fucking.  _ Foreplay… something about foreplay…  _

She chooses a particular instance and opens her eyes, a conspiratorial smirk spreading across her face. Grabbing the stool she keeps against the wall by the whiteboard, she situates herself front and center. 

She leans forward to prop her elbows on her knees, and something inside her celebrates when the girls, without realizing it, mirror her posture. They really are into this, go figure.

“So, when I was seventeen,” she starts, her gaze sweeping across the class, “I had a boyfriend.”

“Kylo!” one of the girls shouts, knowing which boyfriend Rey is talking about. 

_ God, I tell too many stories if they can name my exes with no context. _

Giggling, Rey nods. “Right, Kylo. We both had never had sex before, and we decided that we were going to take everything nice and slow, right? No rush.” Her tone changes, and she eyes everyone purposefully. “Remember that if you’re being pressured into sex, you can always say no. Don’t date or hook up or be friends or  _ anything _ with someone who’s trying to pressure you into something, okay?”

She watches as all of the girls’ heads bob. Rey nods in response.

“Good. Anyways, one night, Kylo and I were fooling around in his car, and he suggests we get in the backseat,” she fibs, remembering the way he actually  _ ordered _ her into the backseat, his dominant side as confident and stern as ever. “Clothes come off, it’s getting a little steamy, you know,” Rey tells them, motioning and gyrating in a lighthearted way. Someone in the back wolf whistles jokingly, and Rey winks. “And Kylo, not really knowing what he’s doing, pushes two fingers into me. I’d never done anything like that before. Even when I masturbated, there was never any penetration. So I yelp. Like,  _ loud _ . And he looks up at me all,” she widens her eyes and slackens her mouth, imitating the expression she can still remember on his face. There are scattered giggles, the girls eating up her story. “And I used some colorful language to tell him to be gentle. He apologized and everything, took his fingers out, and tried again, but gentler. Now, can I teach you girls something?”

Enraptured, they nod. Rey straightens up. “So everyone has something called a g-spot. For people with vaginas,” she explains, careful to keep it gender-neutral, as a student a couple years back had asked, “it’s on the vaginal wall. For those with penises, it’s called the prostate, and you can stimulate it via the perineum or anal sex. I’ll explain more about that later.” 

Standing up, she goes to her desk, grabs a sticky note, and writes “prostate.” Nothing weird about that at all.

Returning to the stool, she resumes her demonstration. “The g-spot is about five to eight centimeters inside the vagina, which, for you weird Americans,” she says, garnering some laughter from the  _ very _ American students in front of her, “is roughly two to three inches.” 

“Now, when inserting something into the vagina, the g-spot can be hard to find. A lot of people don’t think it’s really all that special until they accidentally or all-of-a-sudden stimulate it. But, when using your fingers, there’s a motion that’s pretty easy to do. What it is is you take your fingers,” she holds her hand up, her middle and pointer fingers extended, “and hook them like this. The motion is like a beckoning kind of thing, does that make sense?” 

Several of the girls are watching her hand and trying to copy her motions, while others are blushing, and there are a couple sitting there with a look of cool confidence. Once the ones who are replicating her have the hang of it, she drops her hand back to her lap.

“Anyone who is inexperienced at fingering or being fingered should start out slow. That way, it’s easier to get an idea of what works and what doesn’t, and what just feels good. Some people, especially the finger-er,” she explains, “go a little too rough right off the bat. It’s called ‘jackhammering’ oftentimes, and it can be incredibly uncomfortable to the finger-ee. If you want your partner to be more rough, work up to it.”

Everyone is nodding, and she smiles. “Remember that sex should never hurt. If it hurts, you need to stop. It might burn a little, like you’re stretching a muscle, but pain is a bad sign. You don’t want to tear a muscle down there.”

She relaxes, ready to ease back into the story, then remembers, “Also, make sure your or their nails are trimmed, so you don’t get scratched.”

A final nod, and she’s done with her lecture. Getting off her stool, she goes to her desk, grabs her water bottle, and takes a sip. As she’s drinking, Hanna speaks up. 

“So what did Kylo do?”

Rey screws the top back on her bottle and sits down on the stool once more. “I taught him the hook thing,” she recounts, crooking her fingers like she just taught them to do, “and told him to take it slow. He did, and we figured it out.”

“Did anything else happen?” someone asks, and Rey chuckles. 

“Yes.”

“What was it?” God, girls can be so nosy.

“If you  _ must _ know,” she teases, “I gave him a handjob. At that point in our relationship, I wasn’t comfortable with oral sex, so we stuck with hands instead of mouths.”

Hanna looks like the cat that got the canary. “I love your stories,” she gushes.

Rey rolls her eyes playfully. “Weirdo.”

* * *

Kylo, no,  _ Ben _ \- she’d given people in her life aliases for when she told stories, each name pulled from a book or movie - has, since their breakup, made a home in her mind. He fucks her in her dreams, pulling her hair to make her back arch like he used to do because when she tilted her hips like that it made his cock hit a spot inside her that made her feel like her world was about to explode into supernovas. During her lunch breaks, she imagines him strolling into her classroom, his demeanor easy and self-assured the way it was before he’d gone too far for her to save. She talks to him while she’s driving sometimes, recounting moments of her life now like he knows who she is and what she’s doing and how much she still hurts every time she thinks about everything stupid, twenty one year old, lovestruck Rey imagined her future would be with the love of her life by her side. At bars, she sees him in the darkness that shrouds the fringes of the room, his eyes tracking her like a predator with that gaze she always knew meant she would have bruises in the morning because sometimes his huge hands gripped her a little too hard, and his fingers left bruises on her thighs and her tits and her waist and her hips like she’d been mauled by a bear but claimed by a cock because that ache between her legs could only ever have one cause. 

But then she remembers how he left her. How he’d faded like a vignette at the end, how he’d stopped kissing her and stopped touching her and stopped fucking her and stopped looking at her and stopped talking to her and stopped--

She remembers the cold look in his eyes as she’d stood outside the basketball arena at Chandrila University, her cap and gown soggy on her head while she soaked herself in the rain because she’d chased and chased and chased after him because she wanted him so bad but he was too far gone to be dragged back into the light so he took off into the rain and never even looked back.

Sometimes she thinks it’s unhealthy that she tells her class so many stories about him. It immortalizes him in her head and forces her not to forget. It’s masochistic, the way she buries her thoughts in layers of Ben because she’s so afraid she’ll let go of the one good thing she’d had. 

But he let go so long ago. 

Fifteen years. The realization hits her like a freight train. He left her fifteen years ago. He left, and she wove him into her hair and carried him along for fifteen years.

* * *

“I’m home!”

“Hey, sweetie!” he calls, rushing to type out just two more lines of the contract he’s drafting before he goes downstairs to greet his daughter. 

He finishes up, closes his computer, and walks from the office to the kitchen, where Hanna is rummaging through the pantry.

Smiling, he watches her. “How was school?”

“Good,” she says, and he rolls his eyes when she’s not looking. He’d been warned of the attitude that teenagers are notorious for, hell, he’d been a piece of shit teenager himself, and not too long ago, but her one-word answers strike a chord in him every time. He doesn’t want to force engagement, doesn’t want to push her like his parents did him, but he’d give anything for her to tell him about her day.

They go their separate ways, him finishing with work at 5 and then spending the rest of the night doing chores. Hanna stays in her room, working on homework or, rather, ignoring school in favor of her phone. 

At 6:30, he calls her down for dinner. They sit at the hightop bar table Ben had found at an antique shop not long after she was born. He had meant it to sit three one day. He’d never bought that third chair; instead, the occupant of the second changed. Hanna was just about to be old enough to sit in a chair with them when her mom left.

“So,” he says, bring two bowls of pasta over, one for each of them. “Any fun stories from school today?”

Hanna shovels a giant bite of food into her mouth, thinking as she chews.

“Oh! Ms. Jackson’s class was fun.”

He smiles, glad Hanna is enjoying at least one class. Eighth grade has been hard for her, so far. “Oh yeah? What did you do?”

Something happens that he wasn’t expecting: Hanna turns bright red.

Oh god.

“Um… well, we, uh-- we…”

He puts her out of her misery. “At least tell me which class that is.” He’s always been bad at keeping up with her teachers.

“Health,” Hanna tells him, the stammering gone.

He arches a brow. “ _ Health _ was fun?” Thinking back to middle school, he can’t remember a single enjoyable health class. 

She giggles, blushing again. “Yeah.”

“How was  _ health _ fun?”

“Ms. Jackson is a really good teacher.”

He calls bullshit.

“What else?” he probes. It can’t just be the teacher, no way. 

“Um,” Hanna starts, the stammering back, “well, she told us this story about her ex boyfriend.”

Chuckling, he asks, “Really? Why?”

“This is the… the… the, um,  _ Sex Ed unit _ ,” she says, whispering at the end. 

“Hanna Amidala Skywalker Solo, are you telling me your teacher told the class about when she had sex?” He’s a little put off, to put it lightly. What kind of teacher does that?

“Benjamin Chewbacca Organa Skywalker Solo!” Hanna shouts playfully, countering him. “No. She taught us about, er, what you do  _ before _ sex today.”

“ _ Foreplay _ ?” 

“Yeah. That.” Hanna looks up at him, her eyes wide. He realizes he’s standing, his posture rigid and angry. Taking a deep breath, he sits back down. 

Dubious, he side-eyes his daughter. “What was the story she told you?”

“When she, um, taught her boyfriend  _ things _ .” Hanna’s eyes flit around the room, landing everywhere besides on him. He can’t blame her; he remembers how much he hated talking about anything even  _ remotely _ sexual with his parents. 

“Foreplay things?”

“Yeah! She told us about when she was in the back of the car and had to tell her boyfriend to be gentler. And she told us to go slow and to make sure nothing hurts and to not let anyone pressure you into something you’re not comfortable with.” Hanna blanches, then looks up at him. “Not you as in  _ you _ , but you, like--”

“I got what you meant, sweetie.” 

“Yeah,” Hanna says, clamming up a bit.

At first, the idea of a teacher gossiping about sex was appauling, but, at least the way Hanna is explaining it, he sees the value in educating for real-world situations. It doesn’t seem like gossip; it almost seems like a fable, with a lesson and everything. And the kids are obviously learning, if Hanna’s retelling is any indication. He’s glad Ms. Jackson isn’t teaching abstinence and is instead preparing kids for the sex they, if statistics are any indication, are probably going to have in high school or college.

Still, he can’t help but be protective of his daughter’s innocence. “You’re not watching any videos, are you?”

Hanna’s nose scrunches. “We have to watch a woman give birth on Friday. I’ve heard it’s  _ awful _ .”

Ben chuckles, having been there when Hanna’s mother gave birth to her. Just showing that video is probably better than any abstinence or safe sex program they could teach. 

Speaking of which, “Has she taught you about contraception?”

“That’s on Thursday.” Good, good. 

* * *

The next day, Hanna has another story. 

Blushing, avoiding eye contact, and stammering, she retells Ms. Jackson’s story from class, one about her and her boyfriend having sex for the first time. Hanna tells him that Ms. Jackson made the class repeat a mantra back to her, one that she told herself when her boyfriend asked her to have sex in the back of the car.

“I deserve to feel good. I deserve to be comfortable. I deserve to do this on my own time.”

Ben gets deja vu. He can’t figure out why.

Hanna vows that her first time will be in a bed.

He smiles. Whoever Ms. Jackson is, he likes her.

* * *

The week goes on. Every day, Hanna has a new tale of Ms. Jackson’s awkward yet endearing sexual encounters. 

On Thursday, she tells him Ms. Jackson’s story about a pregnancy scare when she was in college. They covered contraception in class, and Hanna giggles and blushes as she describes to Ben how Ms. Jackson rolled a condom onto a banana, all while saying “conDOM” instead of “CONdom.”

That night, it clicks.

* * *

Rey values honesty. She values goodness and integrity. She values acts of kindness and words of reassurance. 

She looks a little harder at all of her students on Friday. In every class, she sees the blind faith these children have in her, in the world. She sees the ones in the back who have already been hurt. She sees the cliques and the haves and the have-nots. But above all, she sees the beacons of light. 

Her whole life, she’s had an uncanny ability to read people. Someone once said she could read auras, but Rey thinks it’s just intuition. Still, she sees light in people sometimes. She sees darkness in others, all-consuming darkness like the void of a black hole. 

She’s never seen that darkness in a child. Never. She doesn’t think she ever will. It’s a kind of darkness that takes decades to fester. It rots people’s souls and degrades their conscious. She’s only ever seen it once. One man, wrinkled and shriveled and skeleton-like with a withering voice and unmeasurable power. 

On the other hand, so many children are bright. But there are some that shine brighter than all the others. There’s Toby in her first period. He’s shamelessly curious, unafraid to engage and question and react. She sees the way his peers side-eye him, and one day she slips him a note that tells him to come to her if he ever needs an adult at school. Sixth grade is hard, after all, and kids are mean.

Amanda and Claire from her second period are light, but in different ways. Claire has the light of a goddess. She exudes grace and creativity and, Rey’s sure, will grow up to be ethereal and sensual and a brilliant mother, if she chooses to be one. Amanda is innocent, but in a charming way. She has the wisdom of an adult but the joyfulness of a child. 

There are a few students in all of her classes, but seventh period is the one that really sticks out. In the middle seat of the first row, front and center, is Hanna Solo. Hanna bleeds happiness. She’s unabashedly herself. The sternness and forced conformity of middle school have done nothing to stamp out her spirit. Rey remembers the way she blossomed in sixth grade, in an environment that refused to baby students or hold their hands through everything. Some students drowned in it, in the independence they were expected to have, but Hanna stepped up to bat and swung true.

Some days, Rey sees her last name, and it feels like a shot to the heart. It feels like a ghost has torn her throat out of her neck and squeezed it until it collapsed. Her lungs seize and deflate like she’s run out of oxygen, and the tears that drip from her eyes to the roster feel like the last drops of water in her body. Some days, she looks at that name and she remembers the way she screamed for him to come back even as he was driving away. She remembers getting back to their apartment and seeing the empty spaces where Ben’s things sat. She remembers the crying and sobbing and wailing that wouldn’t stop and she cries again, even though she swore years ago that she’d never shed another tear for that man.

The first time she saw Hanna’s last name, she went home and sobbed while she Googled how many people have the last name “Solo.” One ancestry site said their database alone had over eleven thousand people registered to it with that last name.

There’s no way. She moved to the other side of the country. There’s no way.

* * *

They grew up in suburban New Jersey. Nothing ever happened there.

They went to school in New York. A million new things happened every day.

She doesn’t know where he ended up. She never bothered to look for him. It hurt too much to type his name into a search bar, knowing she’d see that he moved on just fine without her. All she allowed herself to know was that he took the job she’d begged him not to. It was high-profile. He probably had bitches and parties and mansions in ten different countries.

It would only take one search to show her all of that, to rip an old wound open and prove to her that he never really needed her in the first place. 

The problem was that that old wound never got stitched up properly to begin with. It healed all wrong, leaving a gnarly scar in its place, a scar that disfigured her heart and left her a shell of a woman.

She moved to Lake Tahoe. Nothing ever happened there.

* * *

Thursday afternoon, she stays at school late. Grades for the first six weeks of school are due Friday at 4:30, and she always makes it a point to leave a special note for each of her students.

On Monday, she did first and second period. On Tuesday, she did third and four. Wednesday was fifth and sixth. And Thursday was seventh.

_ Hanna Solo _ , her screen read. Her cursor blinked, waiting for her to find the words to say to Hanna’s parents, to tell them how incredible their daughter is.

* * *

_ Hanna is a wonderful student. She’s a devoted learner and a hard worker. I’m so glad to have her in my class, and I can’t wait to finish out the semester with her. --Ms. Rey Jackson _

* * *

Ben reads the note over and over and over again. 

Hanna had been ecstatic when she got home. Not even waiting for him to meet her in the kitchen, she’d rushed into his office, shoving the paper in his face and smiling.

“Ms. Jackson wrote a note for me! Look!”

There on her report card were her grades for each class. The last column of the report was labeled “Notes.” None of Hanna’s teachers had left one except for Ms. Jackson. 

His heart dropped and a wave of nausea crashed over him. He had to play it cool in front of Hanna, though, so he looked up at her. “That’s wonderful, sweetie,” he praised, pushing his chair back so she could give him a hug. She did, still grinning, and then ran off to her room, leaving him alone in his office with the paper and his thoughts.

There’s no way.

He’d suspected it, sure. But faced with the fact that  _ he was right _ , there’s no way. There has to be another Rey Jackson, right?

Maybe. But a Rey Jackson who taught her first boyfriend foreplay and refused to lose her virginity in the back of a car and repeated a mantra to herself about sex and had a pregnancy scare junior year of college because she’d missed a couple days of birth control?

_ Rey Jackson. Rey Jackson. Rey Jackson. _

* * *

Rey’s been having really vivid dreams lately.

They aren’t unusual. They’re just not… usual. She’s never been one to have a lot of wet dreams, so the fact that she’s been having them, like,  _ all the time _ is a little weird. 

The man in her dreams isn’t someone in particular. He doesn’t have a face, at least not one she can see. But he’s tall and wide and his hair is long and his voice rumbles in his chest like thunder. In some dreams, she giggles and fumbles with him, but they’re in it together, so it’s okay. In other dreams, he fucks her like a full-on dom. In some dreams still, she ties him up and rides him until he’s begging her to stop because he’s too overstimulated. 

In her dreams, he slides into her like a hot knife through butter, like it hasn’t been nearly half a decade since she last kissed someone, let alone had sex. In her dreams, he bends her over and pushes her hair to one side and pins her in place while he mutters filth into her ear. In her dreams, he tells her he loves her, that he’d never leave.

She wakes up. She turns her vibrator on. She watches porn to get her mind off of it while she takes care of the throbbing between her legs. She takes a shower and washes the evidence away.

It’s hard to tell if she really wants Hanna to be in some way related to Ben. She either really wants it, or she really doesn’t. 

Report cards go home. A week passes.

Nothing. It seems her hunch, the one that led her to sign off using her full name instead of just her last name, was just a hunch and nothing more. 

Oh well.

* * *

Ben reads the note every day. Is that pathetic? It’s not even for him, it’s for his daughter, but he’s hung up on the fact that  _ she _ wrote it.

_ Rey Jackson. Rey Jackson. Rey Jackson. _

He goes on Hanna’s school’s website. He finds her email. He writes it down on a sticky note and stares at it constantly, even while he should be working.

The way their relationship ended is probably his biggest regret in life. He had no choice, though. He had to do it.

He looks at her email address. He looks at the time. 

His focus shifts to his keyboard.  _ Dear Rey Jackson... _

* * *

_ Dear Rey Jackson, _

_ I hope this email finds you well. My name is Benjamin Solo, and I am Hanna’s father. She’s in your seventh period, I believe. _

_ Hanna was overjoyed at your note on her report card. Thank you for your kind words and thoughtfulness. _

_ Ms. Jackson, I don’t mean this the wrong way, but I think we might know each other. I had a Rey Jackson in my life, years ago.  _

_ If I’m wrong, I apologize, but I figured I’d take the chance. _

_ Sincerely, _

_ Benjamin Solo _

* * *

Rey gets very,  _ very _ drunk. She doesn’t tell anyone; she just stays home and drowns her sorrows in a bottle of chardonnay. It tastes strangely salty, but that’s probably just from the tears.

No one needs to know, right? No one would care that the ex she’s never really gotten over just emailed her like nothing had ever gone wrong, like they were friends to the end.

She wakes up the next morning, a Saturday, thank god, her head pounding and her throat dry. Stumbling into the kitchen, she gets herself a glass of water and some Advil. There’s a hangover cure juice shot somewhere in her fridge, so she scrounges for it before finding it on a shelf in the door. It hasn’t even expired yet.

She takes it. The ginger cuts straight through her cloudy thoughts.

_ Why did I get so drunk last night? _

It takes her a second, but she remembers.

Frantically, she looks around for her laptop. It’s charging on the coffee table in the living room, and she dashes over to it and logs on. 

Google Chrome, log into the right email, open Gmail, check sent messages, and…

Nothing. She didn’t respond to his email. Thank god. 

Well, she might as well respond now. She’s awake… ish.

* * *

_ Mr. Solo, _

_ Thank you for your email. I really do enjoy having Hanna in class, so I’m glad she appreciated my note.  _

_ As for your inquiry into a prior relationship between the two of us, though it is wholly inappropriate, I will admit that yes, I am the Rey Jackson from “years ago,” assuming you haven’t met another since you left me. _

_ Good day. _

_ Ms. Jackson _

* * *

She’s angry. It’s not hard to tell.

Truthfully, part of him had still been holding onto the hope that it isn’t her. It wasn’t  _ because _ of her, it was just… this conversation is going to be painful and awful and everything he wishes he could avoid. 

She’s gotten quite good at expressing passive-aggressiveness over email, he must admit. He remembers the texts she used to send him that read strangely because she was awful at conveying emotion through written words. 

There’s no handbook for this, no instruction manual, no “Reconciling with Your Ex You Haven’t Seen in 15 Years After You Broke Up With Her at Your College Graduation -- For Dummies!” He’s not a dummy.

So tries his best and sends her another email.

* * *

_ Rey,  _

_ Can I call you Rey? _

_ I know you’re mad at me. I understand why. Would you be willing to hear my explanation, though? It doesn’t have to be long, just a coffee this weekend or something. I’d really like to see you again. _

_ Ben _

* * *

_ Mr. Solo, _

_ You may call me Ms. Jackson. _

_ Saturday. The Starbucks on Main Street, 10 AM. I’ll give you thirty minutes. This is highly inappropriate, but given our history, I will allow it. _

_ Sincerely, _

_ Ms. Jackson _

* * *

_ Ms. Jackson, _

_ Thank you. _

_ Ben Solo _

* * *

He gets there at 9:45. Hanna thinks it’s a work breakfast and is sleeping in at home. 

His excuse is that he wanted to get a table. It’s a coffee shop on a Saturday morning. It  _ must _ get crowded, right?

Part of him is beyond excited. Regardless of the way things ended, he’s missed her, all these years.

The other part of him is anxious. His hands are shaking as he opens the door to the warm little cafe. She probably hates him. 

He orders a tall cold brew and a butter croissant. It’s the same order he’s gotten since the cold brew got added to the menu, and before then, he got an iced black coffee. 

He wonders if Rey still gets something disgustingly sugary. Her drinks were always awful in his opinion, but she hated his black coffee, to be fair. She has to still get a blueberry muffin, though. She loved those too much to stop ordering them.

At 10:00 on the dot, Rey walks in. For a second, he stops breathing.

She looks almost exactly like she did the last time he saw her. She’s still tiny, but there’s something about her that’s… softer. Her jawline is less pronounced, and it looks like she’s gotten curvier.

She cut her hair. That’s the biggest change. He remembers it falling to just below her breasts, but now it doesn’t even skim her shoulders. 

Her whole body is layered and covered by clothes. A sherpa-lined jean jacket sits on top of a long, flowing cardigan. Under that is a skirt like the ones he remembers his teachers wearing in grade school, except she can pull hers off flawlessly without looking like an out-of-touch grandmother. She’s tucked a t-shirt into her skirt, and her steps are loud and clomping because of the giant brown leather boots on her feet.

She enters with a gust of wind and a jingle of bells. She looks at him and her expression hardens. 

He hates that  _ he’s _ the one who elicits that reaction in her. 

Marching up to the counter, her demeanor changes as she interacts with the barista. She was always exceptionally kind to service workers, having been one herself for years on end. Apparently, that’s a habit she hasn’t dropped.

She’s given her coffee and a piece of pumpkin bread, and he watches her steel herself before approaching the table.

“Hello, Rey,” he says, his voice friendly.

Her eyes snap open. If looks could kill…

“Er, Ms. Jackson,” he corrects quickly. 

She nods once in approval. “Hi, Mr. Solo.” Without saying anything else or asking him for permission, she sits down. 

“You can just call me Ben,” he offers.

She just about  _ snarls, _ “I will call you Mr. Solo, thank you very much.”

Shocked, he nods dumbly. 

It hits him how much she’s changed. The Rey he knew fifteen years ago never would have asserted herself like that. She was shy and timid, almost afraid to be heard or seen. But since, she’s obviously grown into herself in a metaphorical sense, not hesitating to put her foot down. 

Not to mention she got pumpkin bread instead of the muffin he was willing to bet on.

Sitting back confidently, she takes a sip of her drink before setting it back on the table. Once it’s down, she looks at him, her eye contact direct and intense. 

“So,” she says, an eyebrow arching, “explain.”

He’s thrown off. “Wh--”

“You said you’d explain why you left, so explain.”

He goes quiet, then nods. 

“Snoke is the main reason,” Ben begins. “You know he had his claws in me since the beginning of senior year. I was excited to work for someone who understood my abilities and believed in my potential…”

* * *

Rey listens to him, she really does. He rambles on and on about Snoke and his manipulation, and she listens.

She’d only ever met Snoke once. It was a holiday gala hosted by his company at Lincoln Center, of all places. She’d saved for  _ months _ to buy that dress, but she swore to herself that she’d go to the gala, no matter how awkward she felt, and she’d  _ floor _ Ben. She wanted him  _ drooling _ over her all night until they finally returned to their apartment. 

They’d walked in together, Rey’s hand tucked in the crook of his elbow. The way he looked down at her made her glow, and everything felt like stardust. The fabric of his suit was soft and velvet, just like her dress and the carpet and the chairs. The world brushed against her and purred, and she reveled in it.

But then Ben had introduced her to Snoke, the single darkest person she’d ever met. The only black hole she knew? That was him. He sucked the light out of the room and squealed in glee, fed and sustained by leeching happiness and love from those around him.

After the gala, they’d gone home. Rey waited until they were inside to tell him that she hated Snoke, that she knew he wasn’t going to be healthy for Ben.

Ben had lashed out. He’d broken a vase. He’d screamed and he’d yelled and she’d cried. Her tears still not dry, she’d fallen asleep on the couch that night. Ben had taken the bed. 

The dress she’d wanted him to drool over turned into the dress she’d dried her tears with. There were makeup stains on the skirt from where she wiped her eyes before realizing they were painted more heavily than they’d ever been before.

The beginning of the end.

* * *

“...so I did whatever he asked of me. I didn’t want to leave you, but he told me to, so I did.”

“You’re making yourself sound like a misguided child and not an adult man,” she butts in. He can hear the underlying bitterness in her tone. 

“He was a master manipulator.”

“So he told you to leave me?”

“Yes.”

She scoffs. “Right, okay. What exactly was it that he said?”

He furrows his brows, confused as to where she’s going with this. “That you were a distraction and that I needed to end things with you.”

“Did he tell you to bail on the second half of the graduation ceremony?”

“No…” Ben says, still not getting her point.

She drives farther. “Did he tell you to just all of a sudden move out of our flat?”

“I mean, he--”

“Yes or no, Mr. Solo?” she demands, and the way she addresses him makes his heart squeeze painfully inside his chest.

“No.”

“Did he tell you to leave me standing in the rain?”

“I didn’t--” he protests, but she cuts him off.

“Yes you did, Mr. Solo. I chased you out of that stadium, and you never even looked back.” Her voice is getting louder, and he winces at the attention it’s drawing. 

She seems to realize it and quiets down, but she doesn’t lay off on the questioning. “Did he tell you to leave me without saying anything?”

Ben sighs. “No, he didn’t.”

“Did he tell you to ignore my texts and calls?”

“I mean, that was impl--”

“For god’s sake, yes or no?” she exclaims, clearly exasperated. 

“Fine! No! Is that what you wanted to hear?!”

The look she gives him is deadly. “It’s not what I wanted to hear, but it’s all I  _ needed _ to hear, you arrogant prick,” she hisses before getting up and storming out the door.

* * *

“Boys,” she tells her class on Monday, “ain’t shit.”

They erupt into giggles, and Rey can’t help but laugh with them. They could be laughing at any one of many things, from the word “ain’t” in her accent to the fact that a teacher said “shit” to the general sentiment of her statement. Still, their open laughter is contagious and healing as she lets the cloud that’s been hovering over her all weekend dissipate just a little.

“Did something happen, Ms. Jackson?” one of the girls asks.

Rey smiles sadly. “I saw Kylo.”

The last of the giggles go quiet, and an entire room of surprised faces look up at her.

“Really?” Hanna asks. Cruel irony.

“I did,” she affirms, sitting in her stool. “He left me right after our college graduation ceremony, and I hadn’t seen him until Saturday. But he emailed me last week, and we agreed to meet up.”

“What happened?”

“What did he say?”

“Does he  _ loooove _ you?”

She chuckles humorlessly. “He said that he left me because his boss told him to.”

There’s a moment of silence, the calm before the storm.

“He  _ what _ ?!”

“That’s so  _ dumb _ !”

“Why would anyone  _ do _ that?!”

“That makes no sense!”

“Who is it, Ms. Jackson?” One voice is louder than the others, and everyone quiets down so the one girl, Callie, in the second row, can speak. “We’ll beat him up for you.”

Rey can’t help but laugh. “No, no. No beating people up.”

“But we love you!”

“He deserves it!”

“Too bad!”

She looks at them incredulously. “You guys are  _ bloodthirsty _ , jeez!”

They laugh, the angry atmosphere fading. 

“So what are you going to do?”

It’s a question she’s been pondering since she left Starbucks at 9:07 Saturday morning. 

“I don’t know,” she confesses. “I was hoping it was going to be so much better. But it seems like he just doesn’t care anymore. I guess his boss just made everything bad.”

Several of the girls look angry, and others just look confused. 

“Ms. Jackson?” Hanna pipes up. “Do you still love him?”

Rey rubs her face. “It’s been fifteen years. I don’t know.”

“How  _ old _ are you?!” She doesn’t recognize the voice of whoever says it, their tone is so high-pitched.

Again, their serious conversation dissolves into a fit of giggles.

“Older than you, that’s for sure,” Rey deflects, winking. 36 is the real answer. She’s 36 and so, so alone.

* * *

Ben is dreading Hanna coming home. That’s never happened before, but with the way she’s been gushing over  _ Ms. Jackson _ recently, he’s not sure if he can take another story from her class.

The Monday after he meets with Rey, Hanna comes home seeming dejected.

“What’s wrong, sweetie?” he asks when he sees her.

She looks up at him, shrugging. “Ms. Jackson saw her ex-boyfriend this weekend. She says she wanted things to go well, but it was actually really bad.”

Ben barely manages to suppress the emotions threatening to show on his face.

“Why are you sad about it?” He doesn’t quite understand his daughter’s emotional investment in her teacher.

Hanna fidgets with her phone. “Because Ms. Jackson is amazing. But she was really sad today. I think she still likes Kylo, and he kinda broke her heart again. She told us about how they broke up, and it’s so sad.”

It’s like an arrow through his chest.  _ She was really sad today. She still likes him. He broke her heart. It’s so sad. _

The truth is he knows she deserves so much more than what he gave her, both fifteen years ago and on Saturday. Her reaction in the coffee shop made him realize some things, and he wants to tell her that. 

He only has one way of contacting her, so he writes an email.

* * *

_ Dear Ms. Jackson, _

_ Hanna came home today and told me about your conversation in class today. Between that and my own thoughts after Saturday, I hope you’ll give me the chance to tell you some things. _

_ I realize now how much harder I made things on you fifteen years ago. I realize that I made things hurt more than I needed to.  _

_ Since Saturday, I’ve accepted that the way we ended was my fault. I think I was deflecting the blame to make it hurt less. But now I’ve come to realize that the blame falls wholly on me. _

_ I want you to know that I stopped working for Snoke when Hanna’s mother left, around seven years ago. Using information I’d gained over my time with him, I was able to get the proper authorities involved and dismantle the First Order. At the end of the day, I don’t think I would have been able to do it if it weren’t for all you told me when we were still together.  _

_ I don’t know if you’re willing to give me yet another chance. But I think I’m ready to talk to you, not just defend myself. _

_ Yours, _

_ Ben Solo _

* * *

_ Yours. Yours. Yours. _

His words cycle through her head on repeat, but the sign-off is what sticks out among it all.

_ Yours. _

_ Mine. _

She doesn’t tell her class about it. Even though she already figured that some amount of what she told the girls would be shared with the parents, she doesn’t want Hanna feeding her dad more information than Rey really wants to give with him.

The internal debate goes on all week. Should she give him another chance?

* * *

_ Ben, _

_ Starbucks again. Same time. _

_ Rey _

* * *

This time, she’s the one who’s there early. He walks in at 9:55, and she’s claimed the same table they sat at last time. 

The half-smile she throws his way as he walks in is reassuring. He orders, then settles himself across from her. 

He’s the first one to talk. “So can I call you Rey now?”

She smiles a little, looking down into her cup. The lid is off, and he realizes it’s not one of the sickly sweet concoctions she used to get. 

It’s not coffee at all. It’s tea.

Maybe change is good. Maybe the time is what they needed. 

“Yeah, Ben.”

**Author's Note:**

> please let me know if i missed any tags and let me know what you think!!
> 
> find me on [twitter](twitter.com/riiasshorts)


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